Yes, it's a $10 printer.

A real color inkjet printer by a real manufacturer. It’s fast, it’s quiet, it prints at 4800x600 dpi, it gets four-star reviews on Amazon even at full price. Today’s it’s ten dollars. Ten bucks. One Hamilton. A single lone sawbuck. There’s only one way this printer could possibly be cheaper, and that’s if you used it to print your own $10 bills. Don’t do that. It’s illegal.

Why? Why is this available for the lowest price ever for a decent printer? Our buyers kick ass, is one answer. This is what they were born to do, as you can see here literally every day. This printer deal’s so good, we have to limit sales to one per customer, so they don’t all get snapped up by other retailers. Thanks to our buyers, our retail price is better than the current wholesale price.

We can hear you naysayers neighing, “So what if the printer’s ten bucks? You still have to buy the ink.” Which is the other half of the answer as to why these are so cheap, and exactly the point we’re trying to make.

The cheap-printer hustle is just a recent iteration of an age-old game. The manufacturer takes a loss to get you hooked with a cheap printer. They give you all this molded plastic and tooled metal, all this sophisticated circuitry, this array of precision sprayers, for less than it cost them to make.

Because they know that once you buy the printer, they can put the screws to you for years of overpriced ink. Only once you see the eye-watering prices of replacement ink do you realize you’ve been conned. You’ll be paying over and over for that “good deal” on the printer. But what are you gonna do? Go buy some other printer and start the dance all over again?

So we decided to stretch the absurdity. Heighten the contradiction. Bend this angle to its ultimate extreme. We found a good, cheap inkjet printer for an even cheaper price and slashed our margin to the cheapest possible point. The true cheapskates among you can avail yourselves of cheap ink options. Buy third-party reconditioned cartridges and refill them with those little squirt bottles to really stick it to the man. (Of course, Canon recommends that you only buy Canon cartridges. Because OF COURSE they do.)

Think again about all the technology that went into this printer. The fact that we can offer this printer for ten bucks, but we’ll never, ever get our hands on replacement ink for that kind of discount, exposes the sham economics of the printer industry. The relative retail prices of these items have nothing whatsoever to do with the costs of producing them. There is no universe in which even the crappiest printer costs less to make than a few ounces of ink in a plastic cartridge.

If any printer manufacturers want to prove us wrong, give us a call. We’d love to sell some official Canon ink at a discount. But we’re not holding our breath.